Ben-Hur is a glorious example of epic Hollywood filmmaking—big, bombastic, sometimes creaky and often inspiring. It combines the usual ahistorical Hollywood hokum (“Roman salutes,” slave galleys, stately white marble) with an epic story that’s more Alexandre Dumas than the Gospel of Luke. A young man, Read More …
Christians are fond of rehearsing the story, told in Humphrey Carpenter’s The Inklings, of J.R.R. Tolkien nudging C.S. Lewis past the conversion tipping point with a well-timed comment about mythopoeia. When Lewis objected that other cultures and religions shared many mythic elements with Christianity, Tolkien Read More …
The Sixth Sense was not M. Night Shyamalan’s debut feature film, but it might as well have been for all the immediate attention and status it earned him from moviegoing audiences. His first two films – Praying with Anger and Wide Awake – each dealt, Read More …
Here you are in prison. They say you may die here. You call your friends to your side. — My friends, I want you to ask him this :Are you the one who is to come, or shall we look for another?But John, you once Read More …
“If you want to learn, then go and ask the wild animals and the birds, the flowers and the fish. Any of them can tell you what the Lord has done. Every living creature is in the hands of God.” – Job 12:7-10 Wolfwalkers is Read More …
The idea of general revelation seems forgotten in the modern theological discourse as we debate things like “Would Jesus allow trans kids to play games with their friends?” and “Is empathy a sin?” But the idea that all people understand on some level that there Read More …
Despair is rarely more oppressive or more acute than when we cannot hope for a future. Alfonso Cuarón’s film Children of Men, based on a novel by P.D. James, explores this condition in perhaps its most primal aspect. In the film, humanity has stopped being Read More …
Signs came out during a precarious moment of cinematic history in the sometimes-fraught relationship between communities of faith and Hollywood. Following the release of The Last Temptation of Christ, a movie which critics loved and the Church at large hated, movies that openly addressed topics Read More …
This commercial dog is not going to ruin my Christmas. A Charlie Brown Christmas premiered on CBS on December 9, 1965, and every year since, it has continued to welcome viewers into twenty-five minutes of the cool sounds of Vince Guaraldi’s music, the vivid colors Read More …
What makes Solomon Northrup a painfully effective avatar through which the modern viewer can experience slavery is that, like almost all of us, he was not born into it. A free man of color living in New York, he takes a job as a musician Read More …